Team Arkham
by Checkerboards
Summary: You might be good at basketball, you might be good at track, but when it comes to lunacy, you might as well step back. Goooo Arkham!


Mental illness goes hand in hand with humiliation. Yes, being aneurotypical itself can be humiliating – after all, no one would choose to dress up in a hodgepodge of charity-drive clothes and lipstick smeared in a six-inch-wide clown grin and frolic around the room chattering rapid-fire about celebrities (at least, no one without an MTV contract). But the stigma of mental illness itself was not nearly as humiliating as being labeled as mentally ill simply because your brain was too fabulous for the average doctor to understand it. How degrading, to have your gifts and talents relegated to the circular file of insanity merely because they were beyond anyone else's comprehension! Obsessive-compulsive, narcissistic, histrionic – the Riddler hadn't come close to accumulating the list of diagnoses that the Joker had gathered over the years, but in his opinion, every one was one too many.

But the ignominy of the labels paled in comparison to the indignity of living inside Arkham Asylum. It seemed like every day the doctors had a new plan to spark some sanity inside their brains, even though most of them were only there because Blackgate couldn't (or wouldn't) hold them. They'd been put through the entire round of therapies – group therapy, occupational therapy, talk therapy, art, dance, music, and a host of others – and it hadn't done anyone a bit of good (except for Killer Moth, who had belatedly discovered that he had quite a gift for ballet). They'd sat through lectures and education sessions and workshops. They'd been drugged, restrained, and threatened with levels of physical torture ranging from bumps and bruises to a fist in the teeth. They'd even been forced into doing a victim encounter group, which had failed the instant that the Joker walked in to encounter the family of one of his thousands of victims and greeted them with a list of well-executed murder puns. Jumping through hoops was nothing new as an inmate of Arkham Asylum.

So when the guard opened his cell door at four in the morning, Edward Nygma was not surprised. Irritated, yes, and certainly angry, but surprised? Not in the slightest.

That is, until the tennis shoes hit him in the chest. "Put 'em on," grunted the guard.

The Riddler untangled the shoes from the fabric surrounding them. A short white tank top with a giant letter A on the front (though they'd at least made it green, not scarlet), a pair of all-too-short white shorts, and a pair of socks that looked long enough to go halfway up his thighs.

"Why?" he asked.

The guard, obeying the cardinal rule of dealing with the Riddler – ie, Don't Answer Questions – shrugged, folded his arms, and waited. With a sigh, Eddie wiggled into the itchy clothes and tied the shoes firmly onto his feet. Oooh, yes…shoes with laces. Any self-respecting criminal mastermind could do a hell of a lot of damage with a nice, strong piece of string like that.

Edward Nygma was not a man who enjoyed physical activity. Oh, he certainly took part in a wide variety of physical activities – everything from clambering about setting up deathtraps in abandoned buildings to running away when those same deathtraps were sprung and dismantled by the Batman – but he didn't necessarily _enjoy_ any part of them, particularly the chases, which tended to end in trips to the hospital.

Needless to say, he was less than enthused to be escorted to the ground floor and Arkham's infrequently frequented gymnasium. His cheap tennis shoes squeaked on the linoleum as the guards at his elbows hustled him along. What were the doctors up to this time? Maybe it was a physical, though they never really seemed to care about anyone's health unless they were actively bleeding.

They arrived at the gym door – a solid metal affair that swung freely on its hinges, as a deterrent to anyone thinking of barricading themselves inside it. The guards elected to open it with the Riddler's head. Eddie stumbled forward into the gym, assisted by a sharp prod in the small of his back, and came to a halt within millimeters of Harvey Dent, who was clad in an identical gym suit to his own. Eddie turned, his back up against the curtain that split the enormous gym in half, and surveyed the room.

Everyone was there. Jervis Tetch, hiking up his baggy waistband, waited patiently next to the looming bulk of Killer Croc in his near-skintight shorts. The Joker, skin blending perfectly with the pure white of his outfit, admired his feet in their tightly laced shoes. Eddie was willing to bet that the clown had already come up with at least five different schemes to use the laces as an ingredient in an escape plan. Even Victor Freeze was there, crammed into his emergency transport suit. The crinkly orange plastic that kept him insulated from the deadly warm air had been squished tightly under the same uniform that everyone else wore, though his had a small hole cut in the back of it to accommodate his cooling machinery. Why had they bothered? Victor was immortal, or the closest thing to it. For him, exercise would be pointless at best and dangerous at worst, particularly if something happened to pop a hole in that bright orange safety suit. The other rogues, top-ranking and bottom-of-the-heap, stood in small groups, chatting about this and that and certainly not discussing plans to escape, of course not, don't be silly, Officer!

And, of course, a squadron of guards lined the walls, hands resting within easy grabbing distance of their tasers. Eddie ignored them, much as he was trying to ignore everything about the situation. Whenever the doctors gathered everyone into one room, that only meant one thing: they'd come up with another harebrained scheme to fix what wasn't even broken in the first place.

The gym's single door swung open again. A psychiatrist – bearded, balding, and bulbous – stepped inside, fussily straightening the papers inside his folder. He was accompanied by one of Arkham's younger doctors, who watched the older one with hero-worshiping awe in his eyes.

"Ahem. Good morning," the young doctor said, attempting to draw everyone's attention. A few rogues glanced his way and, shrugging, returned to their conversations. "Good _morning_!" he bellowed, red-faced with effort.

As the echoes of his shout died away, he coughed self-consciously. "Good morning," he repeated weakly.

"You already said that," someone grunted less-than-helpfully from their anonymous position in the crowd.

The doctor coughed again. "Yes. Well. This is Dr. Wentworth, who's here to include you in his study." Dr. Wentworth, without looking up from his papers, waved a half-hearted greeting.

"What study?"

"The…It's…" He rallied. "You don't need to know that yet. He'll be interviewing each of you later on. For now, he'll just be observing." He opened the door and beckoned into the hallway. A brunette in a neon-green gym suit bounced excitedly into the room. "Gentlemen, ladies, this is Miss Stevens. She'll be leading your new sessions."

"What kind of sessions?"

The doctor ignored the question. "So, we'll leave you in the capable hands of Miss Stevens. Behave yourselves," he added, in a tone that was trying to be Stern Guardian but fell short somewhere around Pleading Puppydog. Then, bowing the older doctor out before him, he made his escape into the hallway.

"How are we all doing today?" Miss Stevens chirped, clapping her hands together with enthusiasm.

The rogues collectively grumbled something that might have been an answer.

"I said, how are we all _doing_ today?"

_We're locked in an asylum for the criminally insane. How do you _think_ we're doing_? Eddie carefully didn't say, mindful of the half-dozen official hands poised over their tasers.

"Aw, come on, folks. Lighten up! Let's have some fun!" She gave Mr. Freeze a friendly pat on the shoulder, blissfully ignoring the bitter and, yes, _icy_ glare that he shot in her direction. "I know what'll cheer you all up. Wait here for just a minute!" She darted into the hallway, returning half a nanosecond later with a boom box the size of a small child.

Instantly, a few of the rogues did perk up – including Eddie. Boom boxes like that were full of wonderful wires and circuit boards and all kinds of fantastic things that could conceivably make their time at Arkham much, much shorter. And, of course, for the less mechanically inclined, it was a big heavy thing that they could use to whack someone on the head.

Miss Stevens clicked a button. Happy, peppy music pumped out of the large speakers.

"Okay! Let's do some stretches! Reeeeeeeeeeach up to the sky…"

Hands firmly stayed at their owners' sides.

"Come on, people, let's go!"

The air remained steadfastly empty of waving arms.

Miss Stevens allowed the ghost of a frown to touch her smiling features. "It's my job to make sure you all get some physical activity," she said, hands on her hips, "and if you don't participate, I can't do my job. Arms up!"

If she was aiming for empathy, she had missed her mark entirely. Hoping for empathy from the rogues was rather like hoping for it to rain lemonade. However, there was one sure-fire way to get the rogues to listen within the walls of Arkham. Behind Miss Stevens, a lone orderly tapped the belt pack at his waist. As usual, the threat of a syringe full of Thorazine or Stelazine or Whatever-Makes-You-Obey-Me-azine went quite a long way toward ensuring the rogues' cooperation.

One by one, halfheartedly, they raised their arms. This, at least, was easy – all of them had plenty of experience with putting their hands over their heads.

"Arms down!"

Arms obediently dropped.

"Great!" she enthused. "I think we'll start today off with a little game. Get into two circles and hold hands."

"Screw that," Mr. Scarface snorted, shifting away from his nearest neighbor. "I'm not holdin' hands with nobody!"

"But he's fine with that hand up his ass," someone chuckled, just a shade too loudly.

"Whadja say to me?" the tiny wooden rogue demanded, leaning forward out of Arnold Wesker's panicked grasp. He drew his tiny arm back in preparation to punch someone's teeth out. Instead, the guard lurking two steps behind him grabbed Wesker's elbow, pivoted him over his knee to the floor, and sat on his head while another guard syringed him into obedience. The last they saw of Wesker was his feet, dragging along limply on the tiles, with the mute body of Mr. Scarface draped over his right ankle.

So it was going to be _that_ kind of day. Mutely, the rest of the rogues in the room circled up. Eddie found himself sandwiched between the Scarecrow and the Mad Hatter – not the best of choices, but it could have been worse. He could have been trapped in the other circle, which was threatening to implode on itself as the Joker and Poison Ivy held an impromptu death-stare contest over Harley Quinn's head.

"Now, I'm going to take these two lengths of string and – "

The doors slammed open again. "No no no no no!" yelped the youngest doctor. "No string!" He snatched it from her hands.

"But it's part of the game!"

"_No string_!" He stuffed it into his pocket. Eddie rolled his eyes. No string, and yet they were all wearing shoelaces. Bureaucracy at its finest.

"I can use the duct tape, though, right?"

"No!" he screeched, confiscating that as well.

Eddie raised an eyebrow. She'd had a roll of duct tape – where? Her bright green shorts didn't leave much room for herself, let alone a bulky roll of tape. What other useful little things might she have brought in?

The doctor was apparently thinking the same thing. "What else did you bring?"

"Uh, let's see. Balloons…a pair of dice…some rubber bands…" One by one, the items landed in his hands. "So what of that can I use?"

"Nothing!"

"Well, I can't organize a game with nothing! What am I supposed to use?"

"Nothing. Something. I don't know. I'll find you something for next time. Just…do something else, okay?" he said. He scurried back into the hallway.

Miss Stevens frowned thoughtfully for a moment, then shrugged. "Oh well. He left us the music! You can get out of the circles. Now…who here has heard of Zumba?"

"Isn't he that guy that knocked over the Keystone Christmas thing last year?" Harley Quinn asked.

"Nope. Follow along!"

* * *

Eddie, in his Arkham-issue gray boxer shorts, stumbled into his cell and collapsed onto his bed. In the hallway, the guards checked his gym suit one more time, laboriously counting each of its six pieces to make sure that he hadn't taken any of them, and left.

The morning had been a nightmare. Zumba, as it turned out, was dancing. And this wasn't ordinary Jazzercise-style bounce-gently-to-the-beat stuff. No, this was bendy and stretchy and full of pelvic wiggling. And while, to the average incarcerated man, seeing Miss Stevens gyrate like a belly dancer on speed was a lovely distraction, being expected to do it themselves was a whole new kettle of fish. The option of taking a fist to the jaw and a needle to the backside had been looking more and more attractive to many of them until the guards' shift change, which had filled the room with the kind of uniformed bullies that wouldn't stop hitting you simply because you had passed out.

And so the room had continued along in their Zumba adventure. Forty-five minutes of dancing later, Miss Stevens had congratulated them all on an excellent first day (which was bad) and said that she looked forward to seeing them again (which was worse) tomorrow (which pretty much wrapped up the whole thing in a big bundle of terrible, in Eddie's opinion).

Not that he was planning on being there tomorrow. He had a mattress full of bedsprings, an easily picked lock, and a long-memorized schedule of guard activity burned into the back of his mind. As soon as the sun went down, he'd be gone.

* * *

The sun went down. The moon came up. The rogues, tucked silently into bed, made no sound to disturb the tranquil stillness of the night. A guard walked by. Red light flared through his closed eyelids as the guard shone his flashlight on Eddie's supposedly sleeping face. Then, satisfied, he sauntered down the hallway.

As his footsteps receded into the distance, Eddie leapt out of bed, lockpick in hand, and got to work. Ninety seconds later, he swung his door open and strutted triumphantly into the hallway, only to find that every single other cell in the hall had its door swung wide open as well. Rogues in their inmate grays glared at one another as they shouldered their way to the exit.

Eddie fell in line behind Harvey Dent – who, Eddie couldn't help noticing, was idly twisting a key around his scarred fingers. "Where did you get that?" he demanded.

"Doc owed us a favor," Two-Face smirked.

"Lotta favors bein' called in tonight," Killer Moth chuckled.

Eddie scowled and continued pacing down the hallway. The rogues moved forward rather like a school of sharks – swimming together peacefully for now, but one hint of blood in the water would get the real party started. They padded silently toward the T-intersection that marked the way out. The hall to the right would get them to the lobby faster, but led right past more than one guardroom. The hall to the left was the safer option, but it would take them on a long, winding trek through the back wards before eventually letting them out at the intake hall.

Crazy Quilt, in the lead, rounded the right-hand corner and immediately flew backward, landing flat on his back a good five feet down the left-hand turn of the hall. A guard – yet another Lyle Bolton wannabe - stepped into the end of the hall, filling the T-intersection with his massive blue-clad bulk.

Most people would be wet-their-pants terrified to suddenly be facing down Arkham's most notorious residents. But this guard was not most people. Calmly, quietly, he reached down to his belt and pressed the alarm button on his radio. Sirens whined their way up to ear-splitting levels as little red emergency lights blinked urgently on the ceiling. "Back to bed, ladies," the guard ordered.

A distinctive metallic clicking sound cut through the cacophony. Eddie took a look behind him and immediately flattened himself to the wall as the Joker sauntered by, aiming the long, skinny barrel of a bright purple handgun at the guard. How the hell had he gotten a gun into Arkham? He must have called in one hell of a favor. The cluster of rogues parted hurriedly to let the well-armed clown go where he pleased.

The guard scowled. "You don't scare me. Put that thing down or you'll be sorry!"

"If you say so," the Joker shrugged. He tossed the weapon to the floor in front of the guard. It clacked heavily to the ground, snapped in half, and spewed a bright green cloud of laughing gas in every direction. The guard fell on the ground, laughing hysterically, as the Joker stepped over him and skipped away. Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, with their immunities to toxins, shoved their way through the crowd and disappeared in the cloud of green mist.

Holding his breath, Eddie darted forward, swallowed up in the surge of inmates desperately trying to get out as quickly as possible. They swarmed around the corner just in time to meet the riot squad, who battered them back with their huge plastic shields. Like dominoes, the crowd tipped backward, falling all over the ground in a tangle of limbs.

Someone's head hit the Riddler square in the gut. He gasped with pain and had only a moment to regret it before the fireworks of chemically-induced hilarity exploded in his brain. He laughed and laughed, his chuckles mixing with the laughter of all the other would-be escapees as the riot squad stormed forward over the fake gun and the body of their collapsed cohort. Everything was hilarious right up to the point when the madly guffawing riot squad leader tripped over the Clock King's leg and slammed right into Eddie's head, knocking him cold.

* * *

Nearly everyone in Arkham Asylum had suffered a laughing-gas hangover at some point or another. The Joker didn't always plan to kill the people he gassed. After all, what was funnier than seeing someone wet themselves in terror only to find that he'd given them a few hours of chuckles, max, and – the best part – that the _next_ time he attacked, they'd be brave and bold right up until the moment that they were a cackling cadaver-to-be.

The Riddler slumped down in his hard metal chair, head throbbing, nausea swirling quietly in his stomach. Chains clinked as he tried to get comfortable. With a sigh, he thought longingly of the days when Freudian theory held sway within Arkham, allowing the rogues to relax for an hour at a time on a couch that was slightly softer than a bag of cement.

The young doctor from yesterday – Ingram, his nametag read – hurried into the room, holding a stack of papers. "Mr. Nygma. How are we doing today?"

"Rotten," Eddie grumbled.

"Good," Ingram said absently, flipping through his papers. "Fill these out, please." He turned on his heel and left, locking the door behind him.

A sheaf of paper the size of a first-time author's manuscript towered on the desk in front of Eddie, accompanied by a small pile of blunt charcoal sticks. Eddie rubbed his eyes, trying to focus, and flicked open the first of the questionnaires.

Sometimes, if the questioners were careless, you could learn a lot about what was going on merely by paying close attention. For example, if you were behind a closed door, and you heard a scream, running feet, and then were asked "Did you see the Joker come through here?", it would be fairly obvious what was going on, particularly if the questioner happened to be bleeding or otherwise traumatized.

With that in mind, Eddie skimmed through the forms. Most of them were the standard questions: age, weight, height, number of years inside institutions, previous diagnoses, allergies, medications. But interspersed in all the mundane things, he found a new trend of questions lurking: Did he have friends as a child? Did he have friends as an adult? Were his parents loving? Kind? Did he have a pet, now or ever? A girlfriend? Boyfriend? Both at once? What did he enjoy doing for recreation – going out to parties, or staying home alone?

Eddie idly sketched a cloud of question marks on the cover page, the motion of his hand gently clinking the chain shackled to his wrist. Relationships. Relationships, and trust, and love. Why would this stranger care – unless he already knew that they didn't have those things, at least not growing up. So why would he need to put them all together…unless it was to build those same relationships and trust that, presumably, would give them some kind of framework to build a bridge to sanity on.

As if anyone in their right mind would trust a rogue…oh.

Duct tape and dice and string. What could anyone do with those – well, what would a too-perky lady in a green gym suit use them for? Games, she'd said. Group games...

In his extremely brief foray into the working world, young Eddie had made a delivery to an office during Team-Building Week (or whatever buzzword-laden jargonfest the title had actually been). Respectable men and women in stylishly expensive suits were gathered in clumps around their office, building tiny structures out of toothpicks, marshmallows, and typing paper. Duct tape in random stripes and patterns on the floor marked the plan for a previous game. It had looked completely ridiculous, much as this was looking now.

The door popped open. "Are you done yet? You haven't _started_?" Ingram gasped. "Did you even read it?"

Eddie grinned. "If I were to tell you that –"

"Never mind, never mind," Ingram snapped, dismissing the riddle he knew was coming. "Just fill it out, okay?" The door slammed shut again.

* * *

The days passed, slow as they'd ever been. Five days a week he was dragged out of his tolerably comfortable bed and marched down to the gym to participate in another round of idiocy masquerading as productive therapy.

The Riddler strode at his customary lightly-shoved pace through the halls, glancing in cell after empty cell as they passed. As he passed one cell, he noticed Harley Quinn's blonde pigtails splayed out over her thin white pillow. Well, at least he'd have someone else around to possibly be a willing volunteer for Miss Stevens' ridiculous exercises.

But Harley Quinn never appeared in the gym. She'd been at the first session. Why wasn't she at this one? Okay, so she'd probably just been recaptured, but still – if he had to be a part of this nonsense, then everyone else should have to be involved too.

Eddie sat on the floor with the rest of them, slowly stretching his legs while his mind did frantic deductive laps. Harley wasn't here. Why? She wasn't out because she was injured. If she was injured that badly, she'd be in the hospital wing instead of her cell.

The study! She'd missed a few sessions while she'd been out on the town. Could it be that missing one or two sessions made you ineligible to attend the rest? It was certainly a possibility. Wesker and Scarface hadn't shown up at a single session after they'd been drugged and dragged…

How could he miss a session? he wondered as he halfheartedly watched Miss Stevens exhorting them to stretch further toward their toes. Could he call in a favor? No, none of the doctors owed him anything at the moment. Could he feign an injury? Well, he _could_, right up to the point that he was found out by Arkham's nursing staff, who enjoyed dealing with malingerers about as much as they enjoyed hitting themselves in the head with hammers. Besides, feigning an injury would mean acting clumsy in front of the other rogues, something that his pride would never let him do. No, he'd just have to come up with a different way to miss a session –

Pink-tipped fingers twiddled themselves annoyingly a mere inch from his eyes. "Eeeeddie," Miss Stevens chirped. "Earth to Eddie! C'mon, we're going to play Red Rover!"

* * *

Another early morning dragged itself along. Once again, the white-clad rogues clustered in the gym, waiting for Miss Stevens to lead them through another round of uselessly bizarre activities. Eddie lurked at the edge of the group, noticing their diminished numbers. They'd started with nearly every rogue in Arkham. One by one, through escapes, injuries, bribes and threats, their numbers had dwindled down to a mere twelve members, and of those twelve, only Eddie, Mr. Freeze, Killer Croc, the Scarecrow, Two-Face and the Mad Hatter were what anyone would consider to be veteran villains. Killer Moth, Crazy Quilt, the Penny Plunderer – sure, some of them had been around for years, but how much crime had they actually committed? They and their low-ranking associates at least had the good sense to not gossip about what exactly was going on behind the gym's little metal door.

Miss Stevens burst in, ponytail bouncing lightly on the back of her neck. An orderly followed her with a giant lumpy bag in his arms. "Good morning!" she sang, acknowledging the grumbled, muttering response as if it had been a chirpy chorus of children. "Have I got a surprise for you today! We've been together for a whole month now. How time has flown!"

It had only been a _month_?

"So I thought we'd do something special today. Dr. Ingram has finally found something we can use!" She pulled at the neck of the bag. An array of black rubber balls wrapped with safety netting bounced free.

"We're playing basketball?"

"What fun is basketball?" She squeezed the ball, happily watching it flex under the pressure of her fingers.

A deep pit of foreboding sinkholed its way through Eddie's stomach. Dodgeball. She was going to make them play dodgeball. He _hated_ dodgeball for much the same reasons that Crane and Tetch did, given that the two of them had the same edge of ancient panic rimming their faces. Dodgeball wasn't dodgeball as much as it was Smack-Eddie-Repeatedly-Ball. And when he'd complained of being targeted, they'd told him that _he_ was to blame because he hadn't dodged quickly enough!

He gritted his teeth and yanked his mind out of Memory Lane with all the force he could muster. He was an adult now, an adult that coincidentally had a hell of a lot of practice at dodging projectiles. Dodgeball was doable. He could stand a round of dodgeball. He could. He _could_, dammit!

Unfortunately, what she had in mind was much worse. For the first time, the huge curtain in the gym was pulled aside to reveal Miss Stevens' master plan.

The peons of the business world had been subjected to all sorts of ridiculous activities in the name of team-building. One of the more popular options was a ropes course. Since no one would allow fifty-foot lengths of rope inside the asylum, and since a field trip to an actual ropes course was completely out of the question, Miss Stevens had done her best with the tools available to her.

Arkham's attic was full of relics from the bad old days of psychiatric treatment. As medications proved themselves more useful than wet bedsheets or leather straps, most of the antiquated devices had been relegated to storage in the attic – that was, until today.

Long, narrow cages were zip-tied together into something that was part jungle gym and part modern art sculpture. An old bedframe had been carefully stood up on end and wrapped tightly in a web of leather restraints. Massive old hydrotherapy tubs had been turned upside down and shoved together like enormous stepping-stones on a dried-out pond. The centerpiece of the room, though, was the mountain of restraint chairs in the middle, zip-tied together into a looming hulk of ancient wood and rotting leather.

Miss Stevens, perky as always, rested one pink-shoed foot on one of the black balls. "We've got all sorts of fun activities to do this morning! Split down the middle into two groups – very good! - and pick a volunteer."

In unison, the Riddler's group shoved him forward. "Hey!" he protested. On the other side of the room, Jonathan Crane had been shown similar affection from his group. He stood, straightening his glasses, ignoring what surely had to have been a painful fist to the back from his loving teammate.

"Okay, gentlemen. Blindfolds!" She tossed two balled-up strips of cloth to the groups. Before Eddie could protest, Harvey had the cloth tied tightly over his eyes. "Good. Now, here's the game. The goal is to get our volunteer up to the very top chair with the ball. The rest of you will have to give him instructions on how to climb, since he won't be able to see."

"Now wait just a minute!" the Riddler protested, beginning to pry the blindfold from his face.

Two perfumed hands plucked his hands away from his eyes and positioned them in front of him. The solid weight of one of the rubber balls filled his palms. "You'll be fine, Eddie," Miss Stevens assured him. Her footsteps pattered to the right. "Jonny, leave that blindfold on!" she scolded. "Now, are you ready, teams? The first team with their volunteer to the top wins!"

"Okay," Killer Croc grunted from behind him. Two immensely strong hands lifted him from the ground.

"No, wait-"

It was not the first time that the Riddler had become airborne without his permission. Nevertheless, familiarity didn't make things any easier. His stomach lurched as the world spun by him. With one hand, he clawed at the blindfold. It dropped from his eyes just in time for him to see the incoming chair. He squeaked and tried to ball himself up, hoping that assuming a sort of midair crash position might help keep him from becoming a big ball of bruises. He hit the chair back with his left hip and dropped down, back against one armrest, legs draped over the other. The ball landed with a soft _whump_ in his cotton-covered lap.

"So what's next?" Croc asked.

"Waylon!" Miss Stevens scolded. "That wasn't very nice. Apologize to Eddie right now!"

Croc grinned up at the Riddler, sharpened teeth gleaming brightly through his green lips. "Sorry…_Eddie_."

"You could have really hurt him. What if you'd missed?"

Croc shrugged, not knowing or not caring what would have happened to an unexpectedly airborne Riddler without the capability to steer.

Eddie began to swing himself off of the armrests. The chair felt odd beneath him. Almost as if it was…moving…

The ancient rusted nails gave way, dropping Eddie and the seat of the chair straight down the side of the pile. He skidded downward, desperately sledding on the old piece of wood, and slammed onto the floor, rolling uncontrollably between the groups until he came to a halt at the back of the room.

The Riddler dragged himself forward on his stomach. Harvey Dent, who had idly seated himself on the floor, chuckled down at him. "Have a nice flight?"

"Shut up," Eddie hissed, giving up the battle with gravity and flopping flat to the ground.

"Eddie!" Miss Stevens rushed to his side, flipping him over and scooping him into a hug. "Are you all right?"

" 'Mfine," Eddie mumbled, face pressed against her chest. And he was fine – horribly, terribly, totally uninjured with no reason to miss tomorrow's festivities.

"You need to be more careful," she said, releasing him and looking him over. Eddie returned the snickering glances of the other rogues with a haughty glare, as if he had beautiful women crawling all over him all the time. Come to think of it, he did. "You sit by the wall and rest for a few minutes while we keep going. Come on, everyone, over here!" She clapped her hands and skipped over to the giant cage sculpture, which was apparently going to double as a tightrope as well as a hot-lava-style can't-touch-the-floor gymnastics exercise.

The rogues gathered around for their various turns on the antiquated equipment. The handful of guards, chuckling, watched Jonathan Crane and Victor Fries attempt to help each other up the structure without actually touching one another. Eddie leaned against the wall. Cold metal chilled his bare shoulder.

Metal? He darted a quick glance behind himself. Somehow, in his up-and-down adventure with the chair pile, he'd ended up splatted right in front of the exit. He prodded it experimentally with an elbow. It swung silently open, with not a word from the guards. He did some rough calculations in his head. Given the time of day, and the number of guards in the room, the lower levels should be all but unguarded for at least another ten minutes.

Could he leave? _Should_ he leave? On one hand, if he left, and they noticed, he'd spend the next few weeks in the hospital wing. On the other hand, if he left and they _didn't_ notice, he'd be able to get back home and get back to work. Either way, he wouldn't have to be involved in this stupid study anymore.

He was hardly a master of stealth, but surely he could manage to pull this one off. With the guards focused entirely on the Scarecrow-Freeze Carnival of Comedy, no one would notice if he just eased the door open – like that – and slid oh-so-quietly into the hallway – like _that_. The door to the gym swung quietly closed. The silence of the hallway may as well have been a thunderous round of applause.

He trotted down the hallway and let himself into the patient belongings storage room, which helpfully stayed unlocked at all times so any employee who cared to could have a brief unauthorized rummage in their stuff for anything valuable. (Few employees actually rummaged through their stuff nowadays, not after that incident with the Joker's exploding shoes.) He took a brief moment to get into something a little more comfortable with a lot fewer PROPERTY OF ARKHAM ASYLUM stamps all over it. Then, with the help of a few of his more clever and no-longer-confiscated gadgets, he popped the ancient window wide open and disappeared.

* * *

Gotham's nights were never truly dark. In a city filled with neon, streetlights, headlights and an occasional lonely ray of moonlight, true darkness could only be found underground.

A shadow slid softly over the windowsill. The dim lights illuminated a patch of question marks printed on its back for just a moment. The shadow crept silently from the open window to the foot of the bed, pausing only when a floorboard shrieked in protest.

The bedside light flared on. "I warn you, I'm armed – oh. It's just you," Dr. Wentworth said, dropping the gun back into his blankets.

The Riddler, taken aback, scowled at the doctor in his flannel pajamas. "What do you mean, it's just me?" he demanded.

Wentworth sighed. "You think you're the first one to show up in my room? Ever since I did that stupid study at Arkham, you people keep showing up. Harvey Two-Face was here four days ago," he added, frowning at the memory. "Gave me some speech about respect and justice and god knows what else, flipped his coin, and left. I figured you'd be the Joker. He's about the only one that hasn't paid me a visit. Come to think of it, I didn't expect you to drop by at all. You've been out of Arkham for, what, a month? Two? What were you doing all that time?"

Eddie shrugged. "This." He tossed a small green ball at the recumbent psychiatrist. It hit him squarely in the chest and popped open, instantly surrounding the man with thousands of hair-fine metallic tendrils that gripped him like an amorous snake. "So, Dr. Wentworth, it's time for a riddle. When is a trap not a trap?"

He'd left the window open, so there was no dramatic crashing of feet through glass, nor was there a crystalline shower of glass shards spiraling artistically into the air. Instead, the heavy black boot soles that Eddie knew all too well cannoned through the air on a nonstop course ending at his ribcage. After a brief, tumbling roll, Eddie found himself facedown on the carpet, breathing in dust bunnies while Batman clicked a pair of cuffs around his wrists.

"Don't move," he ordered the Riddler, driving a knee into his shoulderblade once for good measure before getting up. Eddie, as ordered, laid quietly on the carpet. He didn't move when a spider darted briefly into his line of vision. He didn't move when Batman's cape, swirling past him, brushed his cheek. And, indeed, he didn't move while the metallic tendrils around the psychiatrist responded to Batman's attempt to disarm them by coming to life again, catching the crimefighter around the torso, and pinning him facedown to Dr. Wentworth.

The handcuffs jingled as they slid to the floor. The Riddler got up and brushed carpet fluff from his suit, pretending to ignore Batman weaseling a small wire cutter out of his gauntlet. "When is a trap not a trap? When it's two traps, of course. Enjoy your challenge, Dr. Wentworth. I'm sure that when the two of you work together, you can get free." The wire cutter clicked through one strand. The others responded by tightening down even harder. "Ah ah ah, Batman, no cheating! Remember: teamwork, gentlemen. Good luck or goodbye!" And, pausing only to tilt his hat to a slightly jauntier angle, the Riddler slipped back into the night.

_Author's Note: What's gonna work? Teeeeeeamwork! This was originally written for a Riddler Reverse Big Bang on Tumblr, oh, five or six years ago? Since it's disappeared from its prior home, I thought I'd repost it here. I'd link the picture that inspired it, but I can't find it anywhere online and my only copy was saved on a computer that suffered a shocking death at the hands of a faulty surge protector. Irony!  
_

_The mention of the lipstick-and-celebrities brand of schizophrenia was condensed from __**Is There No Place On Earth For Me? **__by Susan Sheehan. Arkham's history of patient treatment and abuse is remarkably similar to the history of many institutions, examples of which can be seen at places like the Glore Psychiatric Museum of St. Joseph, Missouri. The Joker's exploding shoes are from Gotham Girls episode 303. _


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